Prof. Ahn Cu-rie of Seoul National University’s Medical School, who is in charge of clinical trials, said, "Initially, about 100 patients suffering from neurological illnesses including spinal cord damage and Parkinson’s disease will be selected.” Subjects will be picked depending on when the illnesses began, where and how extensive the damage is, and the chance of helping them using cloned stem cells.

Choi Eun-ji (11) watches her father fill a registration form for test subjects in clinical trials at Seoul National University’s World Stem Cell Hub on Tuesday, the day it started taking applications. Choi has been paraplegic since a car accident several years ago.

Nine research areas have been accepted for clinical stem cell research domestically and abroad, Ahn said. Patients will be selected in order of the areas that will go into the clinical test phase. Ahn did not give a timeframe, but any experimental treatment is said to be still a long way off.

Possible test subjects will go through a number of examinations before their somatic cells will be collected and cloned pending approval by the ethics committee. The stem cells thus produced will first be used in experiments on primates and safety tests before they can eventually be used in clinical trials.

On Tuesday morning, the WSCH website went down just five minutes after it started accepting domestic and international applications at 9 a.m. due to the flood of applicants. The number of visitors to the SNU Hospital homepage, which is connected to the WSCH, increased 10-fold to around 50,000. Patients from across the country scrambled to register at the hub set up in the hospital even before it opened, with more than 500 people able to register at the hub on the day.

The WSCH plans to give a personal explanation to all patients who are not chosen by phone or mail.

(englishnews@chosun.com )